How Digitalization Can Enable a Circular Economy

Unlike discrete manufacturers, process industries are confronted with specific issues to optimize the utilization of their assets and invested capital in order to maximize profit per hour rather than profit per unit of product. Market, technical, regulatory/ compliance, reliability/ integrity and other issues keep those manufacturers from profit maximizing their processes.

Digitalization and especially Real Time Optimization help those companies to take their performance to the next level. Several tools and approaches are available to achieve those targets.

In spite of those obvious benefits to increase profit per hour, adoption of those digital practices has been disappointingly slow and small so far. Data transparency and dis-incentives have been the major roadblocks to implement digitalization in process industries faster and more successfully. Paying attention to those issues can facilitate and accelerate the adoption of digitalization in process industries.